I'm Beginning to Feel Like Bree Van De Kamp!

I'm becoming such the "hausfrau" as they say around here. And I'm not sure I like it. Since we moved in, I've been cleaning and cooking. Cooking and cleaning. And going to the grocery store. Seriously, almost everyday I've been at a grocery store. You have to go so much more here because the refrigerator is slightly bigger than the one I had in the dorm and the freezer is about the same size as the dorm one. Plus, everything here is so stinking healthy. It's like they don't believe in frozen foods, canned goods and good old American preservatives. Food only lasts a few days before going bad. Further, they don't use microwaves here! Which seriously cuts down on my normal cooking style. I've had to learn how to use a steamer (which looks deceptively like a microwave upon first glance) to reheat things. I actually like it for cooking veggies, but it's tricky to make EasyMac! At least my can opener and pots arrived in the air shipment. Now I can at least cook green beans for Aidan on the stove. I think I've used cookbooks more in the last 2 weeks than in the last 2 years. Having time to cook is actually kind of nice, but the daily trips to Migro I can do without!

Cleaning and unpacking seems to be unending too. Our air shipment FINALLY arrived. As much as I was looking forward to getting the rest of our stuff, I didn't realize how much more stuff we had! I had just finished organizing and putting away our first load and the apartment was looking good (minus the empty boxes stacked up waiting to be taken away). Then the new load came.

The main problem is that in Switzerland, they are fanatics about recycling. You can't just throw stuff away. You have to buy stickers to put on every (small) bag of trash you have and recycle everything that can be recycled. Not bad if it's glass or aluminum or plastic bottles, because there are recycling drop off locations all over the place. It's bad when it's huge quantities of cardboard moving boxes. You can only put cardboard out once every 2 months to be taken away, so we were told to make sure that the movers take ALL the boxes and wrapping away with them so we didn't have to worry about it. Sounds easy enough. So, when our first shipment arrived, the movers were here all day and they did take most of the boxes with them then. We knew they'd be back with the air shipment so we just stacked the others behind the couch until they came back (which was supposed to only be a few days later). We should have taken them down to the storage room. I didn't realize that to a 5 year old boy, those boxes were fort building material.

This is where the cleaning comes in. There happened to be some big pieces of styrofoam in a few of the boxes that I didn't know about. Aidan built a house for him and Lainey with the boxes and they decided to break apart the hidden styrofoam to make "train tickets". Then he decided to make a snowstorm. All of this happened within 2 minutes while I was trying to throw in a load of laundry. When I came back to the living room/dining room, it was literally covered in tiny white balls. I almost lost it completely. I have no vacuum yet, and at the time, I also didn't have a broom. Just the kids toy broom and a swiffer. These items were no match for the snowstorm. Those white balls would not be taken down lightly. A week later, armed at least with a normal broom and dustpan, I'm still sweeping them up a few times a day.

So back to the air shipment's arrival. Since I learned my lesson about keeping even a few boxes, I wanted to make sure every last box left with the movers this time. This meant that the movers and I emptied everything on to any available surface or floor in the matter of less than an hour. 35 boxes just dumped all over my apartment. Fabulous. Chaos.

Needless to say, I spent the last 3 days hanging clothes, reorganizing cupboards, and hauling load after load down into our storage room while Jason was at work and the kids were coloring or watching yet another Scooby-Doo movie on the laptop.

This is getting really long...sorry, but I'm not done yet. There's another reason I'm cleaning all the time. My brand new, soft, comfy rug from IKEA sheds like a sheepdog. I have a love-hate relationship with it. We bought the more expensive rug because it was very soft and I figured it would hold up longer than the cheaper ones, but it's kind of a shag made of wool. I didn't know wool sheds for a while until all the loose fibers work their way out. I swear I don't think I swiffered up as much Maddy fur in the nine years she lived with us as I have of rug fibers in the last week! And again, remember I have no vacuum so I'm chasing furballs all over with a swiffer and broom and dustpan.

I've gone so Bree Van De Kamp/Martha Stewart/housefrau that even Aidan has commented on it. He said "I'm glad I'm a boy so when I grow up I can go to work and not have to do all this cleaning and stuff". Great. Now my next assignment is to break down gender-role stereotypes in my 5-year-old.